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Earlier this week, 37 state attorneys general announced a $17 million settlement with Google for placing third-party cookies on Safari browsers in violation of Safari’s privacy settings. These allegations aren’t new — privacy researcher Jonathan Mayer uncovered this practice over two years ago, and the Federal Trade Commission has already reached its own $22.5 million settlement with the company for the same behavior. Usually, I don’t like seeing states expend time and effort to replicate cases that the FTC has already prosecuted (and vice versa). There’s no shortage of potential privacy investigations out there; why retread the same ground?

Last week the FTC announced its proposed settlement with Epic Marketplace, an online advertising company that had been accessing users’ browser history in order to deliver tailored advertising. The FTC found that Epic’s failure to disclose this practice in its privacy policies violated Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits deceptive or unfair consumer acts and…

We’ve blogged before about the practice of browser history sniffing — web developers using a bug in certain browsers to see what other sites a user had been to. We don’t like the practice, and we think it’s probably illegal. Last week, Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer revealed that he had found…

Suddenly, it seems that history sniffing — a long known web exploit — is finally getting the attention it deserves. Last week, Forbes blogger Kashmir Hill drew on an excellent University of California-San Diego study to call out the pornography site YouPorn for snooping on site visitors’ browser history files. Two days ago,…